by Scott Turow
Facing him, in Helen’s drive, a van had been backed to the paneled door of the garage. In his own headlights Stern could read the lettering, reversed to be legible in rearview mirrors:
Not again, he thought, God, not again. He ran up the walk, his change and keys jumping in his pockets; he did not have to ring the bell. Helen, by the door, swept it open and was in his arms at once, weeping and thanking him for coming. He had caught her face for just a second, but it was a sight. She had been fully made up when she started crying. A mess of liner was clumped along her cheeks, and the tears had washed away the cosmetics in streaks below her eyes. A tuft of her hair stood on end. In his arms, in spite of the heavy robe, he could tell that she was otherwise unclad, and all of this—the sight of her, the feeling now, her voice and breath, her urgent clinging—unloosed in him a tremendous wallop of sensation. His poor heart. It was like a barnacle drifting through the sea and ready to attach itself to any prominence. And still how welcome all this was, her ardor, her presence, her declared need. Lord, what a dear person Helen Dudak was to him. For this instant he felt amazing gratitude.
“What? Please?” He held her hands.
She tossed her head about.
“I’m so sorry I had to call you. You were the only person I could think of. Sandy, please…” She did not finish; a retching sound escaped her. She pressed her folded hand to her mouth and once more leaned against him.
“Lady, hey. Sir?” A latino in the ambulance service’s brown uniform was on the landing of the staircase, beckoning down to both of them. “His no good.” The man slowly shook his head.
Helen wailed, a brief wavering sound.
Stern was already on the way up, following the attendant, who had retraced his way along the staircase and was headed down the hall. In Helen’s bedroom there was a terrible stink. The bed was unmade. And a man was in it, a crippled, still figure, unclothed, his face beneath the plastic form of an oxygen mask. In extremity, he had apparently lost control of his bowels. There was a second attendant here, a young white man, and both of them were busy with the equipment which they had at the bedside, two large green cast-iron tanks and a cart with wires and various apparatuses. On one corner of the king-sized bed, entirely unexplained, stood a small wooden end table. The latino, the one Stern had seen on the stairs, gestured to Stern in the doorway. He was removing the last lead from the man’s chest.
“EKG?” He whistled and drew a smooth line in space. “No good. They’ll pronounce him at Riverside. Okay I use the phone? I got to call the cops.” Before he moved on, the attendant leaned over and removed the air mask from the man in the bed and stopped to close his eyes, a quick stroke with his forefinger and his thumb. Even from the doorway, Stern could tell.
“Oh, dear God,” he said out loud. Helen had arrived beside him. Stern was holding on to the doorjamb. “Who is it?” he asked her, moved by some impulse of propriety or hope. Helen had not looked at him directly since he had arrived. She gripped Stern’s hand with both of hers and bowed her head a bit, so that her forehead rested against his shoulder. “Helen, please tell me that is not Dixon.”
As before, she merely shook her head, the washed-out tousles of fox-colored hair. She had no words for the moment. And in any event, what Stern wanted was something she could never say.
With the attendants’ consent, it was Stern who summoned the police. He called Division 4 Homicide and insisted they rouse the lieutenant at home. When he called back, Stern put him on the line with the attendants. At the lieutenant’s instruction, they were relieved, told to go on their way and to leave the body to the police. Stern saw the two out as they bumped their tanks and cart over the threshold. Helen was seated right there, on a low, upholstered bench positioned by the doorway to collect mail or packages or wraps. She remained downcast, looking into a snifter of brandy. Stern sat beside her and she passed him the glass.
“I’m sorry I had to call,” she said again.
“Please, do not—” A hand drummed in the air. The words did not need to be spoken. “In the act?”
She nodded with emphasis.
Dead with his boots on. Dixon Hartnell in his many lost vain moments would be abundantly pleased. Stern attempted without success to smile.
“And how long has this been going on?”
“Going on?”
“This,” said Stern decidedly.
Helen glanced up.
“Sandy, please don’t take that tone with me. He called. Did I do something wrong?”
Stern worked against the weight of various judgments, too shocked, it seemed, to follow his customary instinct for reticence.
“He is married, Helen.”
“I’m not.”
“No,” Stern agreed.
“Do you think this was aimed at you somehow?”
Did he? God knows what he felt. He looked back up the stairs, where Dixon’s body now lay beneath an old blue sheet, like some shrouded piece of statuary.
“He called me. The week you left me high and dry, as a matter of fact. And I enjoyed his company. That’s all.”
“Very well,” said Stern.
“He was very romantic,” said Helen. Her face was harsh with unconcealed ire. “He’d call, he’d come by at any hour. He was charming.”
“Yes, I see,” said Stern. No need now to ask where Dixon was roaming to at night. His next utterance would be ‘Enough.’
They sat in silence. Stern could hear the clocks tick, the appliances. The headlights of another car swept into the drive.
“The policeman,” Stern said.
Helen tightened the belt on her robe, preparing to tell the story.
Radczyk, alone, in his rumpled sport coat and an old fedora, approached the doorway. Stern shooed Helen into the living room, then let him in.
“Always sad occasions, Lieutenant.”
“My business,” said Radczyk, and laughed in his inoffensive, hickish way, amused by himself. His blotchy face was red from sleep. He raked the straying hair over his head and clutched his hat.
Stern introduced Helen, who in a few brief strokes said what she had to. They were making love, she said. Radczyk stood in the living room with his tiny pad, making notes.
“So, let’s see,” he said. “This guy and this gal—” He nodded in a courteous way to Helen, who was standing right there. “This guy—”
“My client,” said Stern.
“Your client,” said Radczyk. He hitched his chin finally and invited Stern to walk farther down the hall.
“I take it this fella wasn’t the gentleman of the house.”
“Ms. Dudak is unmarried. He was my brother-in-law,” said Stern. “My sister’s husband.”
“Okay,” said Radczyk. He nodded a number of times. He got it now.
“This will be terrible for her.”
“Sure, sure. So wha’dya got in mind?” He knew there was something, because Stern had told him on the phone he would ask a favor. He wished to spare his sister, Stern said now. Radczyk listened. It was nothing to him, one way or the other.
“Let me look around, be sure it’s kosher,” Radczyk said. He was matter-of-fact. It was his job.
Upstairs, he examined the body, touched the chest, rolled Dixon a bit from side to side. Radczyk held his nose. “P.U.,” he said. “Stroke or heart attack, you figure?”
“Heart,” said Stern. That was the paramedics’ diagnosis.
Radczyk thought so, too. “Looks okay. No marks or anything. I ain’t got a problem, if you’re sure that’s what you want to do.”
Stern said it was.
“I gotta make a call or two,” said Radczyk. “Get somebody to hit the wrong key on the computer.” He winked. At the doorway to the bedroom, Radczyk grabbed Stern’s arm, lowered his voice. “What about the table?” He hitched a shoulder toward the corner of the bed where the small end table had remained.
Stern only shrugged.
While Radczyk was on the phone, Stern returned to Helen. She had not moved. Sh
e was still in her robe, still pale and stricken, barefoot, with her thin calves looking white without hosiery. The brandy glass was beside her. Stern took it up again and told her what he planned.
“It will be much easier this way for Silvia,” said Stern. Dixon and he were to have lunch with her today. Stern would drive out to the house and together they were going to tell her—that Dixon was going to plead guilty to two counts of mail fraud next week, and soon after would be confined in a federal penitentiary, probably the one in Minnesota, for a year, ten months, actually, with good time. It had not been a task he had been looking forward to, and in a peculiar way the notion that he had already shouldered some ominous duty toward his sister made the thought of what was now at hand easier by some bare measure.
“Silvia,” said Helen. With that realization she started crying again. “I was trying to get even with you, I suppose.”
“You were entitled.”
She wiped her nose on her sleeve before Stern could get out his hanky.
“I was,” said Helen, as only she could, in her frank, emphatic way. “I was so hurt, Sandy. I feel. Felt. Shit.” She lowered her head and laughed and cried at once. “He would have dropped me, anyway. He hadn’t come by for days and he told me tonight that he’d decided we had to break it off. I couldn’t believe it. Jilted by the replacement, too.” Helen smiled a bit, but then the thought of something, the moment probably, came back to her and she wrapped her arms about herself and closed her eyes. “He was trying to comfort me,” she said.
She took a second.
“I should have known better. I tried to get even with Miles, too, after I found out about him. Did you know that? That I had an affair before I left him?”
“No. Should I?”
“I always felt everyone knew. Didn’t you? I was certain you did, that night.”
Stern looked at her blankly. “What night?”
“When Nate dropped by,” said Helen. “At your house? I’d brought dinner?”
He absorbed this, too.
“I do not approve,” Stern said suddenly. “I understand. But I do not approve of any of this.”
This utterance amazed him. Not so much the judgment as its sudden force. He realized that he stood revealed, a man of harsh opinions, which he ordinarily kept to himself. It seemed that he spoke mostly out of confusion, but the significance was not lost on Helen. She looked at him bravely, knowing, apparently, with her strong intuitions of him, that it was necessary that something be denounced.
“Of course not,” she said.
Radczyk returned then.
“Okey-doke,” he said. “All set. No report, no nothin. This here never happened.” He nodded politely to Helen. “I’ll give you a hand,” he said to Stern.
Dixon’s clothes were strewn about the room. Stern gathered the items, but Radczyk took them from his hands. “Here, here, let me,” he said. “Homicide dick is half an undertaker.”
When Dixon was dressed again, they carried him out. Radczyk took the ankles and Stern grasped Dixon’s hands, clammy to the touch and strangely firm. The feel was like nothing human; cool, almost chilled. Dead weight, they said. It was a considerable task. Helen walked away at the sight of the body. They rested Dixon on a sofa in the small den off the kitchen and then Stern backed his car into the garage. Together, they laid Dixon out in the back seat and covered him with the same washed-out sheet.
“I’ll meet you down there,” Radczyk said. “I gotta make a call, then I’ll be there.”
Stern insisted it was not necessary, but Radczyk would not hear of it.
“You gonna go walkin round Center City with a stiff, better have a badge along. Could get pretty peculiar, otherwise.”
Radczyk drove off, and Stern returned to Helen, who had sat again on the bench, her place of contemplation for the night. She had dressed in the interval, a black top and stretch pants, and had washed her face clean of any makeup. She looked plain, drawn but composed. He had been pondering his outburst, haunted now by embarrassment. Something—that high-and-mighty tone—was so wildly hypocritical. He began to apologize.
“Please, Sandy,” she said.
He sighed at length.
“You must understand,” he said. And so he told her, more directly than he ever could have imagined, about Clara: she and Dixon had had a brief affair some years ago. As he spoke, it occurred to him that there was nothing in the world he could not say to Helen Dudak.
“Oh, Sandy.” She covered her open mouth with one hand.
“So you see,” he said.
“Yes, of course.” She closed her eyes. Then she took his hand. “He must have envied you terribly.”
“Envied me?”
“Don’t you see?”
The thought was breathtaking.
They sat together on the bench in silence. He would have to move along, he thought, meet Radczyk. She continued to hold his hand, and now Stern was reluctant to depart.
“How’s your friend?” she asked presently.
He did not understand.
“Your new friend,” Helen said.
“Oh, that.” He smiled to himself. “Well past. Temporary insanity,” he said. “I seem to have grown up again.”
They were both quiet. Eventually, Helen slumped and held her face in her hands in her familiar, youthful manner.
“Do you believe,” she asked, “that we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes all our lives?”
“There is that tendency,” he said. But, of course, if he believed that the soul would forever be a slave to its private fetishes, why had he come to the U.S.? Why did he cry out for justice for those who were most often unredeemable? What, indeed, had he spent these months trying to transcend? “But I also believe in second chances.”
“So do I,” said Helen, and reached over again to take his hand.
After he married Helen the following spring, Stern told her on a number of occasions that it had all been foregone from the moment they had sat together on that bench. But this was not really true. For months after, he remained uncertain about many things, particularly himself, the limits of his strength and the exact form of his wishes. But as he rose to leave that night, he took her once more in his arms—Helen, who had been in bed with Dixon a few hours ago, and Stern, who had his body in the back seat of his car—and felt, as he embraced her in these impossible circumstances, if only for an instant, the clear bright light of desire. It was what he had felt when he greeted her tonight, but the events that had unfolded since had added a new urgency. What was it? He could never explain, but as he had absorbed her peculiar confession, he had been full of strong emotion. In her disorder, her confusion, her hasty admission that she, like the rest of us, was still, for all her effort, partly invisible to herself, he adored her. So he held her another moment and told her a bit more of the story. About the latest turn of events with Dixon. And the fact that his children were involved. He did not say how. Helen, he knew, would want to share every secret, to tell each of hers and to hear from him everything he told no one else. And in time, he realized, he would probably do that. It was that moment, those discoveries, he would be talking about the following spring.
Then Mr. Alejandro Stern, heavy with thought and feeling, drove through the night, eerily aware of the presence behind him. At every light, he tilted down the rearview mirror so that he could look at the form in the back seat. “My God, Dixon,” he said out loud at one point. Envied him. Envied, Helen said. For what? He was a fat man with a foreign accent. The respect he claimed, esteem, was nothing, minor, transitory. What, really, were his achievements? A disordered family life? Poor Dixon. His cravings were unending. Great men, thought Stern, had great appetites. Had someone said that? He was not certain, nor was he sure what name he would put to Dixon. Great something, was the thought tonight.
Radczyk’s car, an old Reliant, was in the loading zone behind the building. Stern took the door handle and was ready to alight when he was struck again with that sensation, clear as
déjà vu, that none of this had happened, that this actual moment was not occurring. Not this or anything of the last week, weeks, months. He was someone else, somewhere else. This was all the concoction of some stupefied wreck in the corner cot of a distant bedlam. He stared at the amber circles thrown down by the crane-necked street lamps and returned gradually to his life.
They carried Dixon under the sheet. Radczyk propped the building’s front doors open with pieces of cardboard and they hauled Dixon around to the back service elevator. In a building tenanted principally by lawyers, someone was likely to be here, even at 5:45 in the morning. In the dirty elevator, they kept Dixon, taller than both of them, between them, under his pale blue sheet. Radczyk held the body upright with a hand on Dixon’s belt.
In Stern’s office, they attempted to position him, as he had been on those two recent nights, on the sofa. Stern crossed Dixon’s legs, and with that the body rolled slowly forward, collapsing by stages, until it arrived with a heavy helpless thump on the floor.
Stern covered his face. It could not be avoided. Both Radczyk and he laughed out loud.
Then they placed him once more on the sofa, holding him there. Stern unbuttoned Dixon’s jacket, lifted his hands. He was like a store mannequin now. When Stern bent Dixon’s legs to position his feet, Dixon’s head fell backward, his mouth open, agape, in an unmistakable pose of death.
